MintKudos

Everybody, uh welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they are passionate about or have been working on. This can be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you have a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community. And today I am happy to introduce to you Catherine and Kei, who will be presenting to us MintKudos. So, uh over to you gang. Um maybe you want to begin by uh explaining who you are and what brought you into the DAO.

Sure, I do have some slides, so let me share my screen. For sure. Okay, uh can everyone, oops sorry. Uh can everyone see my screen? Yep. Yep. Cool. Uh so hi, I'm Catherine, uh nice to meet y'all and Kei is also on the call. Today we're here to share more about MintKudos, which is a product that lets you activate your community one soulbound token at a time. So just a quick intro on myself and Kei.

My name is Catherine as I said earlier, I am the instigator or the cheerleader on this project. Um on this call we also have Kei, who is the technical wizardry behind this project. Kei and I have been working on MintKudos for around 5 months now and it's been a lot of fun. Um to answer your question Narb about how we joined Developer DAO. Well, this was probably around January this year.

Where I was, I just like got my mind blown about Web3. Like nothing in, I I've known about Bitcoin since like 2017. I was passively involved with it with my crypto-bro roomies who were like 'yeah, DeFi this, DeFi that.' And then it really took a few years for me to realize how Web3 was going to significantly impact the world when NFTs came out and when DAOs came out. So my background is, I previously was at a company called Atlassian.

Building tools like Jira, Trello, I'm sure many of you are familiar with being developers. And I was on the New Ventures team where my job was to constantly think about, you know, what is the future of work. And when I saw DAOs, I was like 'oh my god, this is the future of work.' As many of you probably are aware of this, and that's why we're also passionate in here, right? And so what I saw as the future of work was like 'whoa, it's really cool that people can be a part of so many communities that their mission-aligned with.'

And based on the needs of the organization, the DAO, you can contribute based on the skill sets that you have, whether it's, um you're a developer or a designer, marketer, lawyer, whatever. Um and then also get rewarded in ownership, and that just really, really blew my mind. Um so then Kei, I was talking to Kei about this, we were working at a previous startup together and noticed that in a lot of our 1-on-1s, we'd spend like 95% of our time talking about crypto.

Even though we weren't even working in crypto. And so we were like 'holy shit, we need to, we need to do something.' And um kind of egged each other on. I was like 'yo, I'm in Developer DAO, I'm not a developer at all, but I'm in the PM guild and people are really cool. You're a developer, you should be in Developer DAO.' And so I kind of just, we we egged each other on basically and I convinced him to also get one of the NFTs.

And that's how we kind of embarked on this journey and it's been so fun. Um you know, honestly, like Developer DAO, even though I'm not a developer, I still really enjoy the vibes. Every conference I go to, I'm always like 'all right, where, when is the Developer DAO party happening?' because it's always just been such a great time for me. So yeah, that's that's kind of how we found out, or that's how we joined Developer DAO. Um and yeah, so happy to be here. Thanks Narb for the opportunity.

Anyway, going back to MintKudos. Basically, Kei and I we took the full leap of faith when we built strong conviction, as I said earlier, that Web3 was going to just redefine how we think about our work, our lives. It really change how we think about our digital identity. And um you know, this happened when we saw that DAOs were just like changing how people um think about, you know, their lifestyles. And today we have the Big Tech company platforms that primarily own our identity and define kind of who we are.

Based on, you know, our activities and all of that. I'm not going to spend too much time on that. But we're, because of Web3, we're moving into a model where we get to own our identity. But then we thought, 'what does that really look like?' And from a first-principles perspective, we thought 'okay well, you know, we believe that identity is built around the footprints you have in the communities that you're involved in, right?' And let's say, well, communities, what are communities?

Well, communities are these organizations and these entities that are built via people's contributions, participations, achievements, and the time, the energy, and the vibes that they put in. So what if we built a product that helps people activate their community and also recognize people's time and energy spent towards community building at every key moment, and then let those moments of recognition become the building blocks of your identity?

And that's kind of how MintKudos was born, which is yeah, the the easiest way to meaningfully activate and recognize your community with a soulbound twist. Um and so we started this project around January, late January-ish officially. Um since then it's been really exciting being invited to various communities to, to test the product out. And so one of our first starting points was actually Web3Con. And that's kind of yeah, right? Remember that?

I do.

I do too. It was such an experience and I'm, I'm so excited to come, come out with future iterations of the product to give, you know, these hackathon awards in a much easier fashion. Sorry for all the hassle back and forth, but that was definitely such a great experience. And um since then we've had so many more conversations with Developer DAO about potentially using Kudos for the School of Code to recognize education and onboarding of future members.

And really help further Developer DAO's mission. Um also Women Build Web3 is excited about onboarding their, their members via MintKudos as well. And beyond that we've also been working with Alchemy's Road to Web3 program, which I'm sure many of you have seen all the amazing soulbound tokens or the proof-of-knowledge tokens that students have been sharing because they're so proud of, you know, getting their toes wet in Web3 learning about development.

And also completing their products on the way. But besides getting involved in these developer communities, also Web2 design communities and various other organizations have reached out to us as well about commemorations and awards and helping give out digital status symbols and also turning various information on-chain in the form of recognition within their community. And um what's exciting, I guess, in the short term is we're also going to be working with another partner.

To put on like a whole in-person scavenger hunt at NFT NYC to activate those communities and the, the communities that organization is involved in. And so lots of really exciting things, if you're in NFT NYC, I'd love for you to check out this scavenger hunt. So DM me if you're going to be there. And next, I'd like to show everyone the product demo and this kind of yeah, demonstrate how it all works together. And so this is MintKudos.

Um the product is pretty straightforward in that you can turn these community contributions as non-transferable tokens on-chain that's peer-verified and also um this becomes a digital building block of who you are. And so all you have to do is go and click on the 'Create Kudos' button. Um if I recall correctly, Narb, your ETH address is narb.eth. Narbay.eth, uh with an E. N-A-R-B, E as in Bob, E-H dot eth.

Okay, there we go. Um and yeah, Kei's here as well. Someone else also send him this Kudos for just being along this journey with me. Um I know it's late in Japan over there, so thanks for coming. So keikumata.eth. And then I'm going to click 'Next'. And then now I have to, oh Catherine, Catherine, my my ENS is keitoshi.eth. Oh shoot, sorry. All good. We'll have validation later, so it'll be easy to see which ENSes are valid or not.

Yes, it's coming up. And then yeah, when I click on the 'Next' button, I'll have the opportunity to associate this Kudos with Developer DAO here and um we're pretty opinionated with associating a Kudos to a community because in the future we want to do things like analytics to help communities identify 'hey like who, who was my top contributor in the last month? Who attended like this event? Hosted what workshop?' and all of that. And then um yeah, also I can click 'Next' after that.

And pick a headline. So 'Thank you Narb for having us at DevNTell.' Um 'been a pleasure demoing Kudos to the wider Developer DAO community, looking forward to working together more.' So then I can pick a date and add um other metadata that I want to associate with this Kudos and then in the future we'll probably make the metadata also customizable. Um some communities have reached out and said 'hey, I want to implement a point system. Can I do that?'

And so um those are things that we're definitely considering on the roadmap soon. And then you'll have the opportunity to specify what design you want to use for this Kudos. And right now um I'm just going to pick the generic design. And uh what you'll see later is we'll basically slap the headline onto a pretty token so that you don't even have to worry about creating designs if that's not something you have time for. Then click 'Next' and then if everything looks good, um then I can sign.

Oops, let me switch network first. And it's minting. So one thing to note is that we are on Polygon because we wanted to basically, yeah, so this is sorry. This is on Polygon because and we're we're also fronting the gas because we want to make the product experience as accessible as possible. Um and yeah, as you saw it was pretty straightforward, got to mint Kudos here.

And normally I'd be able to just like send this to my teammates for claim, which I will do right now. Um I think it's in the developer-voice channel, but anyway, yeah, there you go Kei and Narb you can claim the Kudos. But assuming that it's claimed, what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to view details and see the metadata that I put in. Okay, yes. Um yeah, been a pleasure. And see the community that this Kudos is associated with and all the other metadata.

And if I forgot to add a teammate, for example, I can also um add a recipient here. So I don't know, maybe I'll just like add myself as well for this demo and then click 'Save', sign again. Um yeah, we we heard a lot of complaints about 'oh shoot, I didn't know someone's ETH address' or 'I want to add another person that I forgot,' and so we built that feature. But anyway, now I also have this Kudos. And then I can go to my profile and see um like basically the Kudos that I have received.

So yeah, I have a lot of like demo Kudos on my profile as you can see right now, but let me just scroll down. Yeah, so um we have, we see this here and then I can also have the opportunity to pin my Kudos. So um if I want to get rid of um this Kudos, I can just unpin that. I'm going to scroll all the way down because I'm so proud of this DevNTell, I can pin this Kudos at the top and you see it shows up here.

And these are yeah, I kind of feel like a Pokemon trainer sometimes when I do this. Um I feel pretty proud of these four. So this one I got for being a part of this like founders program, where we got to be in New York for a month, I lived with eight other founders in this penthouse um and got to live, work every single day in Times Square with them. And then this one I went through Alchemy's tutorial and deployed my first NFT smart contract, which was really exciting.

Then a couple of weeks ago I also was invited by ADPList to go um be a keynote speaker on Web3 and product management. And as you can see here, this is the one that I just created. I can also clap on this, kind of like an endorsement feature. And then um yeah, so this is my profile. And then you can also see like what Kudos you have to claim as well. And then if there's yeah, you can just scroll through that and then um mint it if you want to claim it.

And let's see what else should I demo. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Um yeah, that's a quick demo. And then we also have a lot of exciting things coming up in the future. And so um well, before I get to that, I just wanted to share like all the different use cases that we've seen. So since shipping the first version of our product, we we learned so much. Like there have been so many communities reaching out to us for like all of these use cases.

From education credentialing to member onboarding to event participation to 'hey we launched a new product and we want to celebrate that and commemorate every teammate's contributions,' hackathons, you know, and like grant donation receipts, and even scavenger hunts and also certificates for financial goal savings and employee recognition, employee membership cards, DAO membership cards. And so the use cases is actually just pretty broad and it's all focused on community activation, which is something that I'm really excited about.

And then in terms of our roadmap, there's just, there is a lot. And for example, we have a whole new Kudos creation flow that's coming up where there's a lot more flexibility and also you'll be able to upload your own designs if you want to. And then we also have a Discord bot where instead of having to come to mintkudos.xyz to give your another community member a Kudos, you can just do it directly from Discord and you don't even need to know their ETH address.

So this is a quick demo of that, which is coming soon. And then in the future as I kind of teased earlier, we are opinionated with associating a Kudos to the community because we want to do fancy stuff on top of it later. And so you'll be able to see analytics to understand who your top contributors are, maybe even be able to build things like leaderboards. And also we'll have member directories so that you can remember like your teammates and also their ETH address.

We we get so many complaints where it's like 'okay I love my teammate but I don't want to always have to ask for their ETH address, nor do I want to manage a spreadsheet of a contact list.' So a member directory is also going to likely be coming soon. And yeah, so that's that. If you want to stay in touch or just follow updates on the project, you can just follow us at mintkudosXYZ on Twitter. You can also scan this QR code if you want to.

On Twitter our personal handles are the following as well, just unhappimochi and also keikumata. And yeah, that's the end of my DevNTell. Thank you. Well done, well done. Uh I got a couple of questions uh for me. One is uh is there any plans in the pipeline to uh expose an API to have clients do the mint kudos programmatically or um is that like still still in the works?

Yeah, Kei, did you want to talk about that? We definitely have plans. I think it's always just a matter of prioritization. And we've made some strides towards that, but I'll let Kei share more about that. Yeah, that's a great question. Um so we've actually enabled some programmatic like operations via the API for some of our partners who really wanted it. Like wanted to embed this flow into their product directly. Um so we've already been doing that.

So we're kind of just listening to how people want to use Kudos and how people want to integrate programmatically. But we're totally open to building any kind of APIs. Awesome, awesome. And uh is your project open source? Or uh and or are you looking for anybody in the DAO to help out with anything in particular or is it uh closed for the moment? So um it's closed for the moment, but there's no particular reason.

Like you know, we don't believe in closed source is better or anything like that. Um we just want to make sure that if we open source it where we can empower people to add on to the repo without too much hassle. So you know, if anybody's, you know, willing to work with us in kind of help us open source this slowly and make this workable with uh with the larger DAO, we're totally open to it. We've been talking about this for quite a while.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah, we're a really small team, we're excited about building with community. I think the past 5 months it's just been like 'all right let's just get a good product out the door.' But like we definitely do want to collaborate with the the wider group. And so if anyone has ideas on what you want to build, we can, we can definitely do something together. That sounds really fun. Awesome, awesome. Great to hear.

And uh final question for me. Um is there a reason why uh well, I suppose it's because of of costs and whatnot, but um I guess framed another way, uh is there any plans to have MintKudos be a multi-chain? Um so for example, being able to mint Kudos on Solana or Near Protocol. Um yeah, could you speak on that or? Yeah, yeah. So um it's funny, we actually started from X-DAI Gnosis because we wanted to just like front the gas.

And then we just got so many complaints where people were like 'yo, I want to be able to see my Kudos on OpenSea.' And so then a month later, we we decided to migrate onto Polygon um to be on a chain where gas is still very affordable uh by us, but you can still take advantage of the the other properties. Um and yeah, because because of that people are now able to see their Kudos on OpenSea and people are very happy with it.

In terms of being multi-chain at the same time, we've definitely talked about it. Um I think the plans right now, we we don't have any immediate plans, but Kei's looked into um a multi-chain future. But that's something that we are still actively figuring out. Um bridging as you probably know is just kind of a a crap shoot right now. But I I don't see why not in the future. Awesome to hear. And Kei, if you want to add more, um feel free to do so. I think he's typing. Oh okay. All good, all good.

Yeah, thank you so much. Uh does anybody in the crowd have any questions for Catherine or Kei? Don't be shy now. Hey. So I'm really curious, I joined in a little bit late but I didn't know if you went over this already. Um what kind of inspired this whole idea? Like how did you end up here? Yeah, um so yeah, there's like a few slides on this in the beginning of the presentation.

But the TL;DR here is that well we we, Kei and I we learn about DAOs the beginning of the year/late last year actually. And then we're like 'wow, DAOs have the opportunity to change the way we think about our our work and life and all of that.' Um and so kind of just like from a first principles perspective, we're like 'well what is identity really?' And our belief is that identity is built around the footprints of the communities that you're involved in.

And we're like 'okay well what is a community?' Well community is built via like all of these things. So what if we built a tool for people to one, activate communities, but also commemorate all those meaningful moments around building a community with soulbound tokens so that these become like, you know, the events you go to or like the awards you win and all of these things, the credentials that you earn, achievements you make, they all become these building blocks of your digital identity.

And on top of that we wanted a a product where the concept is just very simple and understandable and so that's how like guess one thing added to another and eventually MintKudos was born. And so like at in your community, you can give each other Kudos for being an activator within the community. And then that also, that recognition then becomes like a a key part of who you are in your digital identity. That's awesome. And um just one quick follow up.

Was I really didn't know about what a soulbound token was until I came across you all. Was that something that y'all coined? Is that something you just saw and ran with? Like where did that, where did that start? Where did that stem from?

I definitely cannot get the credit for using the term 'soulbound.' Um actually that was, um you know that was actually Vitalik's thing. But um even, so Vitalik has come out with around I think two big articles around soulbound tokens at this point. Um one in January and then the second one was just two weeks ago. It's basically just like non-transferable tokens. And we we had been looking at that even prior to the whole soulbound name coming out.

And so um we we found ourselves just kind of like using terms like 'oh non-transferable tokens like NTTs or NT NFTs, like non-transferable non-fungible tokens,' and it was always just kind of like a shitshow trying to like explain these concepts to people. And then Vitalik came out with these two bangers and we're like 'okay, like soulbound.' And so we've been using the term since then. And and since the wider Web3 community is now more aware and exposed to this terminology, it's just been the most convenient term.

That being said, I'm not married to that name, um kind of just like go where the market goes in terms of naming conventions. Thanks, that's cool. It gives me a lot of context. I was so interested. Thanks. Yep. Cool, cool. Um we have about 5 minutes left. Any final questions here for Catherine and Kei? Hey, really cool project. Do you have your contract address posted anywhere and also like a subgraph or anything like that?

Kei, do you have that handy? Yeah, I can I can link you guys to the contract. Um we don't have a subgraph yet, but that's something that we want to, we want to add as well. Let me paste it right now. There you go. Sweet. Um any other questions in the crowd here? So when's the seed round opening? When can we invest? Ah, there you go. Seed round. Um TBD. Does Developer DAO invest collectively right now?

I am Developer DAO, I am all of Developer DAO, and the answer is yes. The meme lord, yes. Love it, love it. So I actually have a couple of people um who, one person I forget what company he kind of founded, but it's a big company, he has connections all across Asia. And then there's another gentleman who's about to work at a16z. Um and then there's another gentleman who has, you know, money that he is giving to European-based founders.

So kind of a global initiative. Um so we all want to kind of combine those global points of funding things for Developer DAO members. Um so potentially in the future, we just got to wrap our head around what that would look like. Um so potentially. Cool, exciting, keep me posted. Add in on to that, um what's up everybody I'm Lance. I'm going to be interning at Andreessen Horowitz this summer and I really want to work on some type of partnership, some way that Andreessen Horowitz can support Developer DAO founders.

So I'd love to stay in touch. Oh that's super cool. Damn, that would be awesome. Cool, cool. Yeah. And I would also say, um you know when you all come to Solana, um I would love to talk, especially for the since it's an NFT-based, um I have a new role that's starting up and a company that I'm going to be working for is very, very focused around NFTs and the creation of them. Um I guess that's a little alpha, but yeah, yeah I would I would love to like keep that channel open when you all are considering that.

Absolutely, you'll be the first to know. Boom, there it is, right here on DevNTell. There you go. Awesome. Well, um we're pretty much at time here. Um so thank you very much again, Catherine and Kei for coming on. Um this was a really awesome DevNTell. Um really informative and and eye-opening and looking forward to seeing MintKudos grow here um in the Web3 community as as time goes on. So um with that, I want to wish everybody a very happy Friday or weekend, whatever it is for you.

And I'll be dropping a link to some DevNTell POAPs that people can claim in the developer-voice text channel. And Catherine I will send you and Kei your special DevNTell POAPs as well. But um yes, um thank you again, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having us. My pleasure. Thanks for hosting. Yeah, you got it. My pleasure. All right gang, with that I will stop the recording.